Acclaim & Disdain
Well distorted promised it, an A&D every other week. It just so happened that he and another friend visited me down here in California during the past week, so I’m a little behind. I spent last night killing the last 150 pigeons I needed in GTA IV and spent this morning finishing up to 100% Completion. Then I played the new Nazi Zombie map for… right, let’s just call it “awhile”. Now without further ado, here’s your Acclaim and Disdain for March 27th.
Acclaim
Let’s start with something that actually is worth acclaim. Around the world today, at 8:30pm, over 100 million people participated in “Earth Hour”. It was an effort to somehow reduce climate change (something people like to call “Global Warming”, you might’ve heard of it) magically by turning your light off for an hour… It is true that it reduced a great strain on the amount of energy required to power the world for an entire hour, thus I’m not going to bad mouth it for the time being.
Disdain
Not one week after I wrote a rant about Twitter, Facebook (the only social networking site that I seem to tolerate) decided to change its layout to be almost exactly like Twitter’s. I had heard a few weeks prior to this switch that Twitter was going to begin competing with Facebook, but when you phrase it that way, it implies that Twitter would be making major changes to be more like Facebook, NOT VICE VERSA! I’ve gotten used to the new layout, but I don’t like it as much. Also shame on Facebook for promoting micro-blogging. The status updates were borderline micro-blogs before, but now it’s just as blatant as can be.
Acclaim
Jon Stewart yet again took off the gloves and went a round as the champion of the layman two weeks ago. In his interview with Jim Cramer on The Daily Show, he tore into the “financial expert” and CNBC as a whole. Cramer left the interview looking like a sniveling coward and seceded to Stewart on all the points he made, he even tried to pretend to be on Stewart’s side at times, but Stewart wouldn’t let him. Someone needed to knock these people down a peg or two, but Stewart thought he’d grind them into the ground. He raises a great point: why aren’t the financial news networks responsible for reporting what’s really going on in the market?
(click here to watch the uncut interview)
Disdain
The beginning of the end of printed media began last week with the Seattle Post Intelligencer printing its final edition of its news on paper. Now that we have entered the digital age and media is so easily brought to your fingertips via the internet, some news outlets are beginning to believe that the only way to bring us the news is digitally. Eventually printed news, books, and magazines will be a thing of the past, and that concerns me. Tangibility is something I need for a book or the news. It needs to have a smell and a weight to it, or else I end up just glazing over it. I still print out my rants (when I actually take the time to proof read them) just so I have something I can touch. Farwell to printed and written word, here comes the digital word.
Acclaim
For my final acclaim, I would like to give it to distorted for reviving our lost A&D segment. It will cause us to have new content at least every other week, even while we’re working on rants. This is about you the reader, who sometimes goes a long while without your Exreality fix because we’re too busy to write rants. This is also homage to how I started writing for distorted reality and the site we were on previous to this because before I found my ability to rant, I would just find an article on the web about someone doing something stupid and post that. Ah to be young again… And that’s your A&D for this week, if you have any comments, please do feel free to leave them at the bottom. Also, if you’re interested in writing A&Ds for the site or just ranting in general, contact us. We are always looking for new writers to mix it up here at Exreality.